PeachyTO’s Reviews > The Poisonwood Bible > Status Update

... forget. You have nothing to lose but you chains.
But I don't happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

To live is to be marked, she said without speaking. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

God grants us long enough lives to punish ourselves.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with a clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune.

For women like me, it seems, its not ours to take charge of beginnings and endings. Not the marriage proposal, the summit conquered, the first shot fired ... Let men write those stories. I can't. I only know the middle ground where we live our lives. We whistle while Rome burns, or we scrub the floor, depending. Don't dare presume there's shame in the lot of a woman who carries on.

Oh, it's a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it's easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that's nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us.

"Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go badly, you will blame yourself."
"What...?"
"I am telling you what I'm telling you. Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky."

To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed" it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that's left halfway unhappy you haven't heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line.

If the first handful of dough is consecrated, the whole mass is, and if the root of a tree is consecrated, so are its branches. If some of the branches have broken off, and you who were only a wild olive shoot have been grafted in and made to share the richness of the olive's root, you must not look down upon the branches. Remember that you do not support the root; the root supports you.